The Ugly Stepsister · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A needle goes through an eyelid.

Someone is stitching lashes onto Elvira, one at a time, and the camera does not cut away. It watches the way a documentary watches, cool and unhurried, while the thing you want stopped keeps happening in the middle of a very pretty frame. That refusal is the whole film. Emilie Blichfeldt knows exactly which shots you want ended, and she does not end them.

Retelling Cinderella from the stepsister's side isn't the invention; that's nearly a genre by now. Blichfeldt's invention is that she gave the transformation a duration and a price. In the fairy tale, becoming beautiful is instant and free. A wish, a wave, rags to gown, and the girl arrives already finished. Blichfeldt keeps the transformation and deletes the magic. What's left is a schedule: procedures, recovery, a tapeworm, a knife, another appointment. And she found her license inside the source instead of importing it. Not Perrault, not Disney, but Grimm's "Aschenputtel," where the sisters cut off a toe and a heel to force the slipper on, and lose their eyes to birds at the end. The film doesn't add cruelty to the tale. It declines the tale's offer to skip it.

This is where Deleuze becomes useful, and specifically where his least famous category becomes useful. Between the two big engines of classical cinema — a person perceives a situation, a person acts to change it — he kept a smaller, nastier one: the impulse-image. Nobody in an impulse-image really acts. They're pulled. An appetite runs through them, uses them, and puts them down. Deleuze called this cinema naturalism, and his examples were Stroheim and Buñuel: films where the mannered world turns out to be a crust over something ravenous.

Naturalism has two floors. The derived milieu is the dressed, visible world, the one with wallpaper. Beneath it is the originary world, a place of raw drives that keeps showing through. Blichfeldt built the film on exactly this plan, and the production design is where you can watch the seam. Upstairs: balls, suitors, courtly display, a kingdom in storybook light. Downstairs, in the same kingdom, the salon is dressed as an industrial processing room and the surgery is dressed as a workshop. Beauty is a business with premises. The film doesn't cut between two worlds; it shows you one world with its floor removed.

Why this lens rather than the obvious one? Because the obvious one makes the film smaller. Read psychologically, The Ugly Stepsister is a girl with low self-esteem who destroys herself, and then the horror is her fault and we're watching a cautionary tale. Naturalism says no: the drive is not Elvira's property. It belongs to the milieu, and she is where it happens to be operating. That's precisely the effect Lea Myren gets and that reviewers keep describing without a name for it — Elvira stays pitiable through escalating grotesquerie, and the disgust lands on the machinery instead of the girl. Deleuze supplies the mechanism for an impression the film produces on everyone.

The drive doesn't want a person, it wants a piece. Deleuze's word for that piece is fetish: a fragment torn out of the world and charged with the entire force of the appetite. The film is an inventory of them. A worm swallowed instead of a meal. Lashes sewn to a rim. A toe. And the slipper, which is the film's symbol in Deleuze's sense, the object that condenses the whole organizing relation. Notice which term the slipper holds fixed. It doesn't measure a foot. It is the standard, and the foot is the variable. Everything cruel in the film follows from that one inversion.

Naturalist films don't have arcs. They have slopes. Deleuze calls it the line of the slope, the irreversible run-down toward exhaustion, and The Ugly Stepsister is engineered as one: each alteration raising the cost of the next, no step back available. This is also, oddly, why the comedy works. A slope has no suspense. We know where it ends, so the film can spend its attention on manner rather than outcome, and the deadpan and the viscera can sit in one scene without cancelling each other out.

The faces carry the argument too. Deleuze separates the reflexive face, a contour holding one immobile quality, from the intensive face, features under pressure with small movements climbing toward a threshold. Agnes is the first, and Marcel Zyskind's painterly light finishes the job by rendering her as a surface. Elvira is the second: Myren's face is a field of micro-movements, always about to arrive somewhere. Then the frame does the ranking. Deleuze treats the frame as a closed set, a system holding a fixed quantity of information, and Blichfeldt uses it as a scale — Elvira staged against mirrors, thresholds, and better bodies, so that composition delivers the verdict and nobody has to speak it.

The debts are legible and specific. The Substance supplies the thesis and the permission for satirical excess in prosthetic escalation. The Neon Demon supplies the mirror-framed gaze and the symmetrical painterly tableau that makes a woman a product on display. Raw supplies coming-of-age as literal viscera, practical effects doing the work a metaphor used to do. Black Swan supplies mirror-doubling and self-mutilation toward perfection. The Skin I Live In supplies the cold surgical grammar: a body remade toward someone else's ideal, the procedure filmed as procedure. And The Company of Wolves supplies the founding move, Grimm revised into feminist body horror with transformation realized as actual mutating flesh. Blichfeldt reverses that last one. In Carter's forest, flesh becomes animal, which is an escape from the social. Here flesh becomes merchandise, which is the opposite of an escape.

What it puts into circulation is smaller than a new style and more dangerous. The Substance needs a substance. Black Swan needs a hallucination. The Skin I Live In needs a surgeon with a grievance. This film needs a mirror and a market. It strips body horror of its last supernatural insulation, and it demonstrates that the nursery canon is already a naturalist archive, sitting there fully licensed, waiting for someone to film what the page skips. It also proves that Deleuze's impulse-image was never a period style stranded in 1925. It just moved into genre.

So watch the light. Zyskind gives you soft filtered storybook and then lets it go clinical at the exact moment of violation, and that temperature change is the film's whole argument made without a word. And keep asking the question the film won't settle. Does Elvira want this? A naturalist would say the question is badly formed, that the wanting belongs to the kingdom. Blichfeldt keeps her human enough that you can't stop asking anyway. The needle goes in, she holds still, and you keep waiting for a cut that doesn't come.